I jumped and turned to see a dog walker standing behind me, his pet wagging its tail beside him.
“My dog,” I said. It was easy to look distressed.
“Oh no!” he said. “Do you think it’s in the water?” I nodded. “Don’t panic; they’re natural swimmers. Do you have a photo? I’ll put it on the village Facebook page. What’s its name?”
“Tibs,” I said, thinking of the tibia. “I’ve already put it on Facebook.”
“What does Tibs look like?”
“He’s a liver and white spaniel.”
“That’s a coincidence,” the dog walker said, looking down at his own liver and white spaniel. “They’re great dogs, aren’t they? Good sniffers.”
That comment left me all aquiver; a good sniffer was the last thing I wanted to meet.
“My friend has a dinghy, might make it easier to search,” he said. “Do you want me to phone him?”
I shook my head.
“It’s no trouble,” the man said. “He loves dogs.”
So he phoned his friend and his friend said he could be there in half an hour. I climbed out of the river to wait, water pouring out of my boots as I trudged up the bank.
“Do you know what happened to this?” the man asked, nodding at the mausoleum.
“Gravity,” I said, and he seemed happy with that. Maybe he was new to the area and didn’t know what a recent development the collapse was.
We stood awkwardly; I was shivering from my dip in the river.
“Do you live nearby?” the man asked. “Do you think you should go and get changed?”
I said that was a very good idea and plodded back up to the house. There, I waited a minute, then ran back down to the graveyard, waving my hands in the air.
“He’s back! He’s back!” I shouted.
“Tibs?”
“Yes. He was there waiting when I got to the house. Pretty muddy, I think he was in the water.”
The man looked elated. “Well, that’s good news! Where is he?”
“In the house. I’d better get back to him. Thank you for your help.”
Thank you for nothing. I couldn’t go back into the water now; I didn’t have another story if I was caught. The only way we’d know about Lennie now was if he appeared. I went back to the house and put my clothes in to wash.
***
I decided not to tell James about the collapsed mausoleum straightaway. Or at all, if I could avoid it. He’d helped me clear up immediately after the accident, but that was in the aftermath of an unexpected, unforeseeable event that had sprung up out of the blue. This problem was caused by my failure to do what he had told me to do regarding the surveyor. I didn’t expect a sympathetic response, and I didn’t want to shatter our relative peace with the news that the local celebrity we’d buried privately was back in the public domain. Anyway, he wouldn’t be able to do anything I couldn’t, which at that point was to continue looking for Lennie.
I thought about tidying some of the bones up. I shuddered. Anyway, where would I put them? What would Mr. Billings say if he went down there and found a stack of human remains in a neat pile? Mind you, what would he say if he went down there and found them as they were? I spent a few minutes in front of the mirror, practicing looking surprised. In the event that this development did come to light, it would be best to be prepared to be caught unprepared.
I tried to calm myself with the thought that if Lennie and all the other bones were swept miles away, maybe as far as the sea, and if James didn’t go down to the graveyard for at least five years, all would be well, the danger would pass. For a moment both of these things seemed possible, but then reality reasserted itself and “it will be fine,” became an empty mantra I repeated to try to keep my panic at bay.
I spent the rest of the day going to and fro from the house to the river, to see if Lennie had turned up. Between searches, I tried to watch my usual TV, hoping it would relax me. After catching the endofBargain Hunt, which was a repeat, I watched the lunchtime news, followed by the local edition. They started with an item about how a number of bones had appeared around the village as the river levels started to go down.
“We thought it must be from the churchyard, didn’t we, Betty?” said Terry Chambers, husband of Betty, who ran the small shop and had found a shoulder socket at the bottom of their garden. “But when we went up there, there was nothing wrong at the church. The river didn’t even get that high.”
“It’s a mystery,” Betty said, twirling the bone around in her fingers.
